Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And by the late republic, the Romans just get kind of really into legal stuff. I don't know why, but – and the Romans were very methodical, organized people, so maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps getting more and more complicated. and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law.
And eventually, it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the 6th century AD, so the 500s, the Roman Emperor Justinian, who is a emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point, the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely call Justinian's Code of Roman Law, and that survives.
And so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world, and it's very complicated. And Roman law, I think, is really fun because on the one hand, it's really dry, but it also preserves these wonderful little vignettes of daily life that So you get these great just kind of entertaining law cases. One of my favorite – and this may not even be a real case.
This might be a hypothetical that they would use like to train Roman sort of law students. It's like one day a man sends a slave to the barber to get a shave. And the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field. And two guys are on the athletic field throwing a ball back and forth. And one of them throws the ball badly. The other guy fails to catch it.
The ball flies into the barbershop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slave's throat. He dies. Who's liable under Roman law? Is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly? Is it athlete two who failed to catch it? Is the barber who actually cut the slave's throat? Is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to get a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field?
Or is it the Roman state rezoning a barbershop next to an athletic field? What do you think?
It's a case without the answer. So we know – we have various jurists commenting on this one, but we don't have what was actually ruled. But it's just a great little, you know, sort of vignette. Right. And that's how complicated Roman law got, that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions.
There's another one where a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out. Who's at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened, as crazy as it sounds. And Roman testamentary law is great.
I mean, something like 20% of Roman law has to do with wills and what you do with a will and what makes a will valid. You know, you have to have seven witnesses and you have to have a guy named a liber prens to witness it. And the witnesses have to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff. So it's just great. I mean, it's fun to mess around in this.
But it always contains these little nuggets about what happens. I mentioned I wrote a book on floods. And there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits it in another apartment building, does that guy now own my furniture? Because it's now legally within his apartment.
Or can I go in there and repossess it because the flood took it out of my apartment? This is the stuff laws handle, and that's how sophisticated Roman law got.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's biased in favor of the wealthy, obviously. And I mean, Roman law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way that politicians, up and coming politicians, aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous was by either prosecuting or defending people in Roman law courts.
And especially during the late Roman Republic, you get a lot of really sensational, what today we'd call celebrity law cases. So this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic kinds of things. And I mean, the most famous Roman order of all time, Cicero, is a guy who made his entire career in the law courts.
And that's how he made his reputation, was able to parlay that into political power, and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government. But it's purely because of his skill, his facility at using words, at giving speeches in public. So they loved the puzzle and the game of...
Yes, and law cases, again, especially in the late Republic, also became a form of public spectacle. So Rome did not have law courts in a building locked away. A lot of these cases were held in the Roman Forum in the open, and audiences would just come to be entertained.
And the people presenting the speeches there were playing as much to this audience as they were to, let's say, the jury or a judge. And that became a big part of the cases. So that's all tied up in Roman oratory too.
I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in Roman law early on, even as early as the 12 tables, is the notion of Roman citizenship. So if you were a Roman citizen, it came with a set of both privileges and obligations. So the obligations were you're supposed to fight in the army, you were supposed to vote in elections.
The privileges were you had the protection of Roman law, and at least in theory, if not in practice, everybody was equal under that law. Now, of course, keep in mind we're talking about men here. And even at the height of the Roman Empire, so let's say second century AD, there were about 50 million human beings living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Maybe –
6 million were actual citizens. So we tend to go, oh, it's so great. If you're a citizen, you have all these things. Well, adult free men who are not slaves, who are not resident foreigners, they have this great stuff. And that's always a tiny minority of all the human beings who existed in this society. But still, the notion, the notion of citizenship is huge.
And citizens, for example, early on, you had to be tried at Rome if you were accused of something. And there's this very famous moment in Sicily where an abusive governor who's corrupt is punishing a citizen arbitrarily. And this person cries out, meaning, I am a Roman citizen. And it really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me protections. It is wrong for you to do this to me.
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